The entire disclosure of Japanese Patent Application Nos: 2006-085208, filed Mar. 27, 2006, 2006-329050, filed Dec. 6, 2006 and 2006-342138, filed Dec. 20, 2006 are expressly incorporated by reference herein.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to techniques for backing up data stored on a recording medium to another recording medium, and more particularly to techniques for quickly backing up a large amount of data in a backup processor with a limited memory capacity.
2. Related Art
Image data captured with an electrophotographic still camera (so-called “digital camera”) or a digital video camera is first stored in a semiconductor memory contained in the camera. A user of the camera backs up the image data stored in the semiconductor memory to another recording medium, such as a compact-disc recordable (CD-R) or a digital versatile disc (DVD), and then deletes the image data in the semiconductor memory so that the semiconductor memory can be used repeatedly.
In other words, because electrophotographic still cameras and digital video cameras have become popular and widely used, more and more general users back up a large amount of data in a rapidly increasing number of instances.
If the file system of a storage medium storing the original data to be backed up is different from the file system of a storage medium for backup, a backup processor must convert the file system. To back up data using a personal computer (PC) or the like, a data image of a storage medium for backup is generated in the PC, and then the data is collectively written to the storage medium (for example, see JP-A-11-185375).
To generate the data image in the backup processor, however, it requires a large memory capacity, which corresponds to the capacity of the storage medium for backup.